Chapter 7
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Cecilia froze, the remnants of the bent lamp clutched in her sweaty fingers.
She knew she should move. Just standing there, arms raised, and gawking at the monster she struck was the stupidest possible thing she could do. Every true crime show host screamed in the back of her mind, urging her to take her opportunity and sprint out the door.
Except she was still seeing double, so she couldn’t quite make out exactly where the door was, and he hadn’t actually moved.
Cecilia blinked rapidly in an attempt to clear her head.
It wasn’t easy. She’d only just managed to stand without tipping over when she heard his footsteps outside the door.
Her balance was off, she wasn’t one hundred percent sure that she wasn’t stuck in a nightmare, and if she tried too hard to recall how she got to the concrete room, all that came to her was spraying blood and dismembered bodies.
It took a lot of work to sort out what was real and what was the drugs.
When she squinted at him, she found that her first impression was correct. He really was just standing there, blocking the doorway with his enormous body, his helmeted head turned away from her. He didn’t even look like he was breathing.
Knees wobbling, she forced words out of lips that still didn’t feel quite like they belonged to her face. “Did… I kill you?”
The room was dark without the lamp. She’d woken up to tomb-like blackness only broken up by the soft twinkle of fairy lights strung over the door.
Even in her drugged state, she immediately noticed that the walls were concrete and starkly windowless.
Now the twinkling lights looked downright sinister as they illuminated the jagged, broken glass of his helmet as it turned in slow motion to face her.
Cecilia had seen some scary stuff in her time at The Lush. She’d scrubbed blood from booths, seen brawls that ended with guns drawn, and, most recently, watched three grown men be torn apart by the monster standing in front of her.
Her phantom.
Nothing came close to the terror he inspired in her when he turned to fix her with a single burning eye. She couldn’t see much more than that through the cracked glass of his helmet, but she didn’t need to.
Cecilia’s fingers went numb. The lamp fell to the floor with a crash, but the monster didn’t even flinch. He stared at her with that dark, burning eye. His diamond-shaped pupil was blown so large it swallowed his iris, giving him a look of fathomless, empty blackness.
An alarm beeped faintly, but she had no idea where it came from. Cecilia stumbled backward on her bandaged feet as a primordial fear took over her body. It piloted her backward like she had any hope of escape in the windowless cell he’d put her.
The fear burned. Slowly, at first, then with a steadily building roar in the pit of her stomach.
Cecilia’s breath hitched as she pushed herself into the corner farthest away from him. Her thighs pressed together reflexively when a pulse of desire echoed between them. Her vision swam when she flattened her sweaty palms against the cool concrete walls, briefly turning the monster into two.
He didn’t chase her across the room. He didn’t yell or throw the lamp at her. He didn’t even growl.
What he did was much, much worse.
He walked. Slowly. Each step a perfectly measured and executed movement that pulled him farther out of the glow of the fairy lights. His heavy boots crunched in the chunks of glass on the stark floor, then went silent as he passed over the fluffy rug. He walked and he didn’t say a word.
Cecilia began to hyperventilate. She looked around for more weapons, but unless she could summon some serious adrenaline super strength, she didn’t think she could chuck the bedside table at his head with any sort of effectiveness.
Besides, without the element of surprise, what chance was there? She’d seen him rip Duke’s arm off like it was nothing. That kind of strength and brutality was beyond her comprehension.
“You should know,” she warbled, flattening her spine against the wall as he officially entered her personal space, “my best friend is a stone-cold crazy bitch. If you kill me, she’ll spend the rest of her life hunting you down and destroying everything you hold dear.
And then she’ll shove something down your throat and watch you die.
I know because she’s told me she would, word for word. ”
Dahlia would never forgive her if she died like this. The woman could hold a grudge like no one Cecilia had ever known, and it’d just been the two of them against the world for so long that she was absolutely certain she’d see her furious best friend in the afterlife.
She warned me to be careful, Cecilia silently bemoaned. She told me to call her if Duke came asking questions. Why didn’t I call her?
Her breathing was little more than shallow pants as the monster pressed his palms flat against the wall on either side of her head.
Heat blazed off of him, scorching her despite the fact that he hadn’t touched her.
The alarm grew louder as his head dipped.
For a wild moment, she thought it might be a manifestation of her panic, but she quickly realized it was coming from within his shattered helmet.
There was another sound, too: a deep, rattling purr so powerful it seemed to shake the very air between them.
Cecilia shuddered as he dropped his head onto her shoulder. The sharp bite of glass against the tender skin of her neck made her jump, but she had nowhere to go and no room to move. Despite being slightly taller than the average arrant woman, he completely towered over her.
The burning in the pit of her stomach intensified with every deep, audible breath he drew in, muddling the very real terror with the same fucked up desire that she’d never been able to explain.
How humiliating. I’m gonna die turned on and not even in cute underwear.
The monster sucked in another deep breath. The pitch of his purr changed as his gloved hands slid slowly down the gritty wall with an ominous rasping sound.
“My doe,” he whispered. His voice was distorted and double-layered. One was the robotic monotone she remembered from all those months ago, while the other came from within the shattered edges of the helmet. That voice was… different.
Rough. Deep. Breathless.
Lust scorched a path down her spine, aimed straight for the juncture between her thighs. Trying to force it down, Cecilia sucked in a deep, shuddering breath. “What…”
She wasn’t even sure what she intended to ask. What do you want? What is happening right now? What can I do to get you to let me go?
Whatever might’ve come out of her mouth was irrelevant because he cut her off with a very elvish hiss.
Her phantom drew one hand away from the wall. She tensed, waiting for those claws to do… whatever it was he intended to do to her, but nothing happened.
Instead of touching her, he reached toward his own neck.
There was a quiet click, then a rustling noise as he lifted the bottom of his broken helmet up.
Her eyes darted down reflexively, but there was little to see.
He hadn’t taken the helmet all the way off.
It’d been lifted just enough to reveal a sturdy chin and finely sculpted lips.
Pearly fangs, an upper and lower pair, were starkly white against the dark shape of the tongue that snaked out to drag against the curve of her jaw.
Electricity sparked along every nerve-ending. Cecilia gasped, her fingers curling against the concrete, desperate to find purchase as her knees wobbled.
She knew he was an elf. Most elite members of Patrol were, and he was clearly that.
But she’d never really been close to one before.
They didn’t socialize with arrants — or anyone besides their kind, really.
Things had been changing since the sovereign took a witch as his wife, but she wagered it’d take at least a century for those changes to trickle down to her lowly social rung.
To her and people like her, the elves were not just indestructible predators who’d once cracked open their bones to suck out the juicy marrow.
They were the lawmakers. The protectors.
The monsters in the dark. They kept the streets clean and the universal income flowing, but they were ruthless in their pursuit of order.
To them, she was nothing.
So it really didn’t make any sense to her why she’d been thrown in what could only be described as the world’s strangest cell.
She wasn’t important enough to ever make herself known to any elf, let alone a member of Patrol.
Aside from that one incident in the alley, she didn’t think she’d ever been worthy of even a glance from one of them.
The few times she’d been near an elf, her instincts had screamed from an ancient place in her mind that still remembered when they’d served her people on dinner plates.
But when this elf ran the flat of his tongue over the hammering pulse in her throat…
Cecilia bit her lower lip until it stung. A sound caught in the base of her throat. It was a strangled, involuntary moan that made her face flame with embarrassment.
One moment the elf was drawing a line down her throat with his tongue and the next he was across the room, one massive hand pushing the shattered mask back into place.
Cecilia lost her balance and sank onto the cold floor. Flabbergasted, she stared at her captor as he pressed his own spine against the opposite wall. Like he was the one desperate to get away from her.
The elf’s single visible eye was so wide she could make out a white ring around that fathomless black center.
His deep chest rose and fell with labored breaths that rasped loudly through his helmet.
Those deadly claws, capped in what looked like black metal, sank into the concrete and gouged deep grooves.
The sight of them made goosebumps rise all over her body.
She brought a shaking hand up to her neck. Cool, damp flesh met her fingertips. Her voice trembled when she demanded, “What is this? I thought— I thought you were protecting me. Why are you doing this?”
The elf’s eye darted left and right. “I am,” he croaked in that unsettling mix of voices. “I— I—”
Feeling emboldened for reasons that most likely related to the drugs in her system, Cecilia lurched away from the wall. It was intensely gratifying to see him flinch backward, like she was the one who posed the threat.
Pointing an accusatory finger at him, she said, “You saved me from Duke, sure. I’m grateful for that. But what the fuck is this? You drugged me, put me in a cell, and now you— you lick me?”
“You required assistance.” There was something like a whine in his bass voice, like he needed her to believe it not for her sake, but for his.
Cecilia stumbled forward, jabbing her glossy, pink-tipped finger at the closed door. “I require you let me go!”
“Stop,” he barked, looking like he wanted the wall to swallow him whole. “Stop walking.”
“Why?” She bared her flat, useless teeth at him. “You afraid of me now? Well, you should be!”
It was an astonishing thing, seeing the moment he decided to run. Him, the terrifying elf who could break her spine with two fingers and half a thought, turned his attention to the door a moment before he made a break for it.
Cecilia let out a screech of outrage as he dove for the door. She wasn’t far from him or it, but he was so much faster than her. Even when she wasn’t fighting off whatever sedative he’d given her, he would’ve beat her to it.
The door slammed shut in her face. Furious at him and her missed chance, she banged on it with all her strength.
“No! Let me out!” Cecilia grabbed the knob and twisted it with both hands, but it wouldn’t budge. A series of clicks along the doorframe told her that whatever lock he had installed, it wasn’t the kind she could pick with a bobby pin or bash open with her shoulder.
A guttural scream tore from her throat. “Don’t you dare do this to me, asshole! Don’t you dare!”
Slapping a hand on the door, she sank into a crouch. She’d been too key-up to notice the ache in her head or the throbbing pain in her cheekbone, but it came to her with a vengeance as she tried to catch her breath.
Gods, she thought, dropping her forehead onto the door, Dahlia is going to be so pissed.